Privacy and Legal Speak in Plain (if not ill-formed) English

The Gist

Podiobooks.com is run by a very small group of dedicated individual human beings. We’re not a big faceless corporation, and we have no uber-agenda which involves taking over the world, fraternizing with government agencies, building re-marketing databases, or stealing from the rich to give to the poor (though the latter is a worthy goal for any man in tights.)

Data Collection

Any and all personal data you give us is kept strictly confidential. We don’t share your information with third parties, even the authors of the books you choose to support with donations.

We might send email notifications from time to time. But if we do, we’ll respect any request to never do it again and remove you from any future attempts to contact you via email.

We use a third party (currently Paypal) to handle your generous donations to the authors. They collect a whole bunch of data, including some of your financial information. They’ve got a pretty solid privacy policy, and you should read it if you are interested in donating. Once you follow any link off of our site, you are no longer subject to our privacy policy. It’s stupid I have to say that, but I do.

Rights on Media Files

When you listen to the freely available episodes of any title on our site, those audio files are covered by a Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No-Derivative, Attribution required license. In other words, you can’t use these files or portions of these files to make any money, you greedy bastard. You can’t alter the files or create a sequel or spinoff from anything — write your own stuff, OK? — and if you do decide to share these audio files (which we encourage), you have to give credit to the author. It would be awesomely good karma if you gave a shout out to Podiobooks.com, too!

Check the “comments” (that’s an ID3 tag which you can view with most MP3 players, at least on your computer) on each episode, because some authors may wish to have a different type of license for his or her work.

None of the above statements apply to any other version of the work. The original work itself is covered by the author’s copyright, and different licenses may apply to print versions, electronic text versions, for-sale audio versions and any other version you might think of.

Indemnification

All the files you download from Podiobooks.com will be common media files and most likely plain old .mp3 files. As far as I know, no one has figured out a way to pass malicious code (virus) in any of the media file formats we use. We hope that never happens, but if it does we are just as screwed as you are. No, we’re more screwed. So be nice, and know that we’ll do what we can to make it right, but we’re not going to financially compensate you for damages, duress, loss of data or any of that stuff. Our society is a lot over litigious, and we’re trying to make the world a better place by giving you free books.

Content

The authors are the ones responsible for telling us to list a title as “explicit” or not. I’m not going to bust my ass trying to keep your kid away from content — that’s your job. No, we’re not going to verify age or anything like that. Be a parent, and have a conversation with your kid. If you want to protect them, fine. Stick to the stuff marked For Kids or Family Friendly. Anything not marked as one of those categories is fair game and should be considered neither, even though we do use the iTunestag. Again, it’s the authors discretion to tell us to flag books or chapters as such.

No one here at Podiobooks.com has any control of what authors say in their books or record in their media files. The ideas, opinions and attitudes expressed by authors inside of these media files are strictly by, for and of the author. That same thing goes for any comments created by listeners of Podiobooks.com.

Now that we’ve covered that, there is one thing which we have to say in very exacting legal terms. Read on, if you dare!

DMCA Notice

(Adapted from CreativeCommons.org)

Podiobooks.com abides by the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by responding to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the DMCA and other applicable laws. As part of our response, we may remove or disable access to material residing on servers controlled or operated by Podiobooks.com that is claimed to be infringing, in which case we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the person who submitted the affected material so that they may make a counter notification, also in accordance with the DMCA.

Notice of Infringing Material

To file a notice of infringing material on a site owned or controlled by Podiobooks.com, please provide a notification containing the following details:

Reasonably sufficient details to enable us to identify the work claimed to be infringed or, if multiple works are claimed to be infringed, a representative list of such works (for example: title, author, URL);

Reasonably sufficient detail to enable us to identify and locate the material that is claimed to be infringing (episode number of title, time stamp in media file, etc.);

A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the material identified in (2) is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;

A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is alleged to be infringed.

Counter-Notification

If material that you have provided to Podiobooks.com has been taken down, you may file a counter-notification that contains the following details:

Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or disabled (book ID, URL);

A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material in question;

Your name, address and telephone number;

A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for judicial district in which your address is located or, if your address is outside of the USA, for any judicial district in which Podiobooks.com may be found and that you will accept service of process from the person who submitted a notice in compliance with the section (c)(1)(C) of the DMCA, as generally described above;

This information should not be construed as legal advice, for further details on the information required for valid DMCA notifications, see 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3).

NOTE: This information is provided exclusively for notifying the service providers referenced above that your copyrighted material(s) might have been infringed. All other inquiries, including technical requests, reports of email abuse and third party reports of piracy, will not receive a response through this process.